eurealist.co.uk

PLANS to give more than a million housing association tenants the right to buy their homes have opened up Cabinet divisions between Alan Milburn and John Prescott.

The dispute threatens to revive Labour’s bitter ideological battles about the policy, pioneered by the Conservative Party in the 1980s, of selling off council houses to tenants at discounted prices.

Mr Milburn, Labour’s general election and policy co- ordinator, wants the right-to-buy policy extended to housing association tenants now excluded from the scheme. He has used a series of speeches in recent weeks to praise the Tory policy, arguing that property ownership is the route to greater social mobility, personal opportunity and equality.

But the Deputy Prime Minister, who is responsible for housing policy and is said to be increasingly irritated by Mr Milburn’s invasion of his territory, is resisting the idea. He has described the policy, which has resulted in more than 1.6 million house sales since 1980, as a “£19 billion disinvestment” in public housing.

Mr Prescott has already moved to restrict the right-to-buy policy and cut the maximum discount of £38,000 in certain areas, in an effort to protect the remaining stock of social housing.

Yesterday Mr Prescott announced that the Government would spend another £150 million on homelessness projects after it emerged that the number of people living in temporary accommodation had risen to more than 100,000, mainly owing to a lack of social housing.